Assemblageing Art in the Middle Ground: untangling the entanglement of visual cultures in contact along the Great Walls frontier

Frontiers are often framed as borders between cultures. This paper seeks instead to elucidate them as zones of interaction, in which social agents and cultural brokers continually navigated their existence between regimes, formulating assemblages of visuals for cultural politics that manifested their mediations. By employing the full corpus of materials from a single locale in the Great Walls frontier, at Xigoupan, and contextualizing those with regional materials spanning from the Chinese Central Plains to Southern Siberia, this study examines changes over the long course of the Iron Age, from Hu kings to Xiongnu chiefs, in order to discern patterns in the material entanglements of arts in the frontier. For this, I adopt a nested approach that builds up from the elements of single visual constructs, to materials and techniques of the objects for those visuals, to the constructs of whole sets of accouterments for individual persons, and to the entanglements of local traditions with those of outside cultural regimes. Through this, I aim to highlight the spectrum of components and materials as they were assemblaged within single objects and within artistic compositions of frontier communities, thereby providing a more robust understanding of the mutually affective forces of cultural politics and visual cultures in zones of interaction.